Software bugs

GNATS is a BTS developed as part of the GNU Project. One of their users set up a page of GNATS web resources, which includes not only GNATS tips but links to other bugtracking (and revision control) systems.

Popularity: 32% [?]

Roman Vichr’s IBM DeveloperWorks article Tips and tricks: a bug’s life lists the features that you might want to consider in a bug tracking system. It also links to several systems.

Popularity: 31% [?]

The Eclipse project has a set of bug writing guidelines, including a great deal of detail about what should go in bug reports. It also gives some motivation for writing good bug reports.

Popularity: 44% [?]

The Debian bug tracking software is an email based bug-tracking system. All bug submissions and updates are handled via email. There is also a web based system for viewing bug reports.

The Debian BTS was developed for use by the Debian project.

Popularity: 31% [?]

In order to close more than a fraction of the 7000 open bugs in GNOME bugzilla, Luis Villa is organising regular bug days. The next bug day is entitled strength in numbers.

Popularity: 33% [?]

Mark Pilgrim dives in where unit tests can’t save him: the depths of libxml2 and client-server communication.

Popularity: 33% [?]

Panopticon Central has Ten Rules of Performance.

Popularity: 32% [?]

del.icio.us yielded up two Java debuggers for me: Omniscient Debugger and FindBugs — a bug pattern finder.

Popularity: 33% [?]

Eric S Raymond and Rick Moen have a HOWTO on asking questions of technical groups the smart way. See in particular the section about not assuming a particular behaviour is a bug.

Popularity: 46% [?]

Good technical questions have many similarities with good bug reports: see in particular The Cardinal Rule of Reporting Technical Problems:

Never, never, never, never, never say `doesn’t work’.

Never.

Proper Prophylaxis:

Just say “I wanted X, but it does Y. How do I get X?”

Popularity: 51% [?]

Lars Wirzenius taught his students binary search using bug hunting.

Popularity: 33% [?]

Joel Spolsky illustrates painless bug tracking by example, advocating using a bug database and advising how to make people use it. He has a second article on the need for a good QA team.

Popularity: 59% [?]

Callum McKenzie rants about minimalistic patches that fix crashes without fixing the underlying problem.

Popularity: 33% [?]

Fog Creek has released a web-based bug tracker and feature request system: FogBUGZ. (Via Joel on Software.) There’s a discussion forum available.

Popularity: 30% [?]

Guido van Rossum has an essay on reference count debugging that argues that there’s no substitute for understanding the reference behaviour of your code.

Popularity: 32% [?]

A DARPA funded project to encourage a community of auditors to review kernel source code for security related holes has failed due to lack of interest according to SecurityFocus. (Via slashdot.)

Popularity: 30% [?]

Chris De Herrera describes describes in detail researching a security problem on Windows Mobile 2003. (Via stargeek.)

Popularity: 32% [?]